Steppers — for daily tasks ! Do they actually help ?
Learnings from B2B perspective
Recently, while working on an logistics software for our B2B(business to business) clients, we ended up in a debate regarding use of progressive disclosure in data submission for a form, in this case: Orders.
The steps of this form were broadly classified into three parts, namely:
1. The Order details,
2. Selecting where to send it, and lastly
3. Where to pick the consignments from
Progressive disclosure is a common-practice used across UX design these days, as it helps reduce cognitive load of the users.
Progressive disclosure is an interaction design technique often used in human computer interaction to help maintain the focus of a user’s attention by reducing clutter, confusion, and cognitive workload. This improves usability by presenting only the minimum data required for the task at hand. The principle is used in journalism’s inverted pyramid style, learning’s spiral approach, and the game twenty questions.
Though this approach reduces the cognitive load and gives clear idea regarding what to be done in each and every step, a question creeped into our mind that, will this approach reduce the productivity of our internal users? This question led to multiple arguments between us(designers) and the Stakeholders ( PM’s, Tech-leads, CTO ) etc.
The answer to the question was “ Lets Test It”
We took the design prototype to our facilities, showed it to our employees at the facilities who were our intended users for the software, and were expected to use the software through the day.
Few responses that we got were:
1. It’s lengthy
Though there were only 3 steps in creating an order, the users felt that looking at the steps made them feel its a lengthy process and doing it all day for each and every order would eat up too much of their time.
2. Lack of context
Once they added the details to step1 and move to step 2, stepper one would hide information and that caused a lack of context regarding the details entered in the previous steps causing the users had to memorise it, which was cognitively heavy task. Also whenever they were in doubt, they had to press back button and go a step backward to check the details, which was not appropriate as per their work style/environment.
Users also felt the need for a summary page before submission would help them be completely confident while submitting the data for the page. :)
The difference between doing it 4–5 times a day and 10–15 times a day
Our enterprise software was intended to be used by clients as well as our client servicing team. Clients need to be treated differently from client servicing teams as they could afford doing things step-by-step as they may not be adept to using the software, could afford to spend more time on each step with extra focus to the details and steppers helped achieve that with progressive disclosure; client servicing teams on the other hand are more fast paced, and need to carry out this task multiple times through the day. For client service teams, speed and accuracy are of prime importance as they have to meet promised Service Level Agreements (SLA’s ) through the day. Verifying the input data manually before final submission becomes a mandatory step here, so as to ensure 0% errors causing loss to organisation.
What we did
We decided to build two different modes for our user types here : The clients and the internal users. The steppers for clients and new users, who require step-by-step progressive disclosure, so as to keep the process intuitive that they would not require any external help. Single page form is for the service team, who were to perform the repetitive task through the day and were well-versed with the procedure, and allow them to perform data verification in a single glance.
We also ensured the form is keyboard friendly for our advanced internal users to do the operations without taking their hands from the keyboard to use the mouse for navigating through the form. The users can navigate to the desired steps by pressing the keyboard “Tab” button.
Learnings
- The steppers give an insight about the length of the process, and allow us progressive disclosure. They are helpful when users don’t have much context of the process.
- Steppers may invoke a feeling that the process is lengthy as users may not be able to visualise the entire process in one glance.
- Steppers may reduce speed for advanced users, as they are not able to move between different parts of the process very easily.
- Steppers suits well in the cases, where users are supposed to save the data entered as draft and revisit it and complete the process at a later point of time.
- Verifying and editing the form becomes easy when the users see all the information entered by them in a single glance, hence the summary page.
Feel free to share your feedback with anulal.vs@delhivery.com
